By the Numbers: Apple Seeds

Back in early May, the lucrative offerings of Pixonic’s Anniversary Event prompted me to dust off my old level 6 Android account, beef it up playing the chests, and take it up through the ranks of Android. I collected data in every league I passed through, though I lamented the inability to compare it to iOS data because when the matchmaker was introduced, I was sorted into Diamond 3.

For all its already-discussed concerns, Project Bathyscaphe has at least been able to facilitate the acquisition of like-to-like data, allowing us to get snapshots of both platforms and put them side by side. Today I’ll begin rolling out some of this early data, with the aim of eventually giving us a look at performance across the full spectrum of play.

We have a lot of ground to cover, so I’m going to dive right in!

First up is a look at the opposition in terms of the people playing the game. Previously I’ve kept these stats pieces separate between iOS and Android, but going forward I’ll be including both where appropriate for comparison. In addition, I’ll be putting data in table form across the board, which is something I hadn’t done previously except for a couple of data elements.

Fig. 1: Player Stats

The Android side of the ledger is blank for the most part, because when the matchmaker sorted my Android account it dropped me into Private 1. Still, not missing a lot here. One thing worth noting is that the sample sizes were about half of the 100+ I usually like to get as a minimum. This was because it doesn’t take much to advance in these lower leagues, and I tended to sail through them fairly quickly.

Still, with the exception of the slight but consistent dip in Private 2, this seems a fairly predictable track. Really, what we’re doing today is just backfilling to the origin point. We’re not going to see a lot of revelation in this early data, though I did find the breakdown of bots particularly fascinating (more on that in a bit).

Player population data measures where players are getting pulled from to constitute my matches. Ideally, you want as narrow spread as possible, right? Bronze 2 should be fighting Bronze 2, Diamond 1 against Diamond 1 and so on. Pixonic has promised that a more rigid constitution is in the works (at least for the non-upper tiers, where the player pool is too thin to permit it), but as for now we get what we get.

What was interesting here? Well, note for one thing the high Unassigned population in the lowest levels of iOS. Nothing sinister or mysterious there, but rather a reflection of the fact that most new players are just getting into the shallow end of the pool, and haven’t played enough to get properly sorted.

Now let’s take a look at the data focusing on what folks are playing.

Fig. 4: Android bot prevalence

Fig. 5: iOS bot prevalence

This the information I found most interesting, because it lets you witness a metagame unfolding before you. At the earliest stages, it’s all Cossacks and Destriers, both of which face a steep and steady decline after Recruit 1. The Schutze is particularly noteworthy. This is a bot that once saw lots of play. Thunder Schutzes were a passable counter to Magnum Gepards, and indeed were sometimes considered to be a clubbing bot in their own right. All of the club, none of the stigma.

But in the Brave New World we inhabit, the Schutze has struggled to find a place. These days the most interest one tends to see in the bot is when pairing it with an Ancile for a highly mobile defensive platform. One wonders if there might not be a rebalancing in the future as was done with the Rogatka, or if it’s just going to rust where it is.

The Medium bots come into the ascendency in Private 3, with big spikes in the Golem and Patton, an increase in the Vityaz, and the first appearances of Boas. For the Vityaz, this is the high-water mark, as its numbers went into decline starting in Private 2. Right about here is where some Gold bots started to occasionally pop up, but not in any appreciable numbers. That’s particularly sad for the Gepard, who used to rule the roost at this level of play. If you’d have told me back in December that Gepards would soon be extinct, I’d have never believed you.

As we exit the Recruit stage and prepare to enter the metallic leagues, what we appear to have is the sort of primordial stew that life emerges from. Some bots are in the midst of dying out, others- like the Griffin– are just starting their climb.

Next time we’ll be back with a look at Bronze, and see how the game continues to evolve as its playerbase develops.